People attend the 2022 Global AI Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Sept. 13, 2022. The 2022 Global AI Summit kicked off in Riyadh on Tuesday.(Photo: Xinhua)

Online tools that can create wonderful, absurd and sometimes horrifying images using artificial intelligence (AI) have exploded in popularity, sparking soul-searching over the nature of art.

Tech companies tout their inventions as a liberating force of art for all, but purists argue that the artist is still the central cog in the machine.

Art historian and AI expert Emily L. Spratt, whose forthcoming book tackles the ethics and regulation of AI art, told AFP that the art world has not yet found a response to the potentially transformative technology.

Punch a few keywords into an AI art tool - something like "Brad Pitt in a rowing boat in space in the style of Mondrian" - and seconds later boldly colored line drawings will emerge of the Hollywood star, paddling in the stars.

There are plenty of fans of tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 who have proclaimed this as the democratization of art.

But Spratt reckons such tools are more about "entertainment and clickbait" than art.

"It is a way to foster engagement with platforms, which is of course going to help these companies," she said.

"The idea that it is solely a tool of empowerment or that it will democratize the space is overly simplistic - it's naive."

Rather, she sees the boundary between AI and other technology becoming blurred, pointing to the image manipulation programs already widely used.

"I see the future of AI as being part of the omnipresent background architecture for all digital image-making processes," she said.

"It will be hard to avoid it because it seeps into all of our digital interactions, often unbeknownst to us, especially when we create, edit, or search images."

Beyond the simple online tools that anyone can use, there are plenty of artists laboring over their own algorithms with bespoke datasets.

These works sell for tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands.

A standout practitioner, said Spratt, is German artist Mario Klingemann whose "Hyperdimensional Attraction Series, Bestiary" is a high point of the genre.

"It is a video of seemingly organic forms that morph from one physical entity to another and momentarily appear as recognizable animals," she said.

"Honestly, it's a bit unnerving but it works well as a commentary on the dividing lines between the material and immaterial and the limits of generative AI to replicate the natural world."

She said his art is constantly asking questions about AI as a medium, and more widely about the nature of creativity.

Until relatively recently, there was very little buzz around AI outside of video installations, largely because there was no bank of digital images with clear labels.

AFP